There Should Be A Map

I wonder if you can write feelings out.   There should be a map, markers to keep me on the right path - something to explain where the trail is leading us,  I am in a wilderness I have never been in before.  Every path seems to fade into the forest and I cannot find any markers, no way to define the right way to go.  How do people do this - for gods sake.  This has to be the cruelest moment of loving  -  I have no idea how to be in these moments - I want them to last forever and be over at the same time.  This time right now with Chewie is so raw and full, I can’t put any more inside me and can’t get enough either. 

I can’t play these feelings out on a piano to make more room in my soul.  Chewie has become so afraid of the vibrations from the piano that he used to sleep under when I played Rachmaninov or Beethoven or Bach or Chopin - now his teeth chatter and he shakes.  So I stopped playing.  It is nothing to stop this to keep him comfortable.  He has given me everything - everything I have ever asked of him - well except the teeter and who cares about that - it was nothing compared to the rest of our lives together.  

He has lost his hearing.  When I come home he no longer wakes up.  Just a couple of weeks ago he would still wake up but he would go to the wrong door.  Still - you must know, it was so reassuring that he would be there to greet me.  It meant that much to him to get up and bark at me and wag his tail and rub his snout against my leg while I scratched his back.  Now I find him and touch him and try to gently wake him so he knows I am back.  He rouses slowly and then stands and shakes himself off and launches into his routine greeting.  He does this out of loyalty and to give me the business about leaving without him.  It means everything to me.  His vulnerability without hearing while painful to me does not seem to be as much of an issue for him as it is for me.  I do my best to not make it worse for him. 

Chewie is 14 and some months old.  He rarely looks at me now when I say his name or open a bag of chips or  laugh or cry.  He would always come to me for those things.  He tries to look at me but his eye sight is going too.  He cares less and less about getting all the treats out of his treat balls.  He lets the puppy have them when the work to roll it is too much.  He leaves peanut butter in the plastic jar and let’s the puppy do the tough work of getting her snout to the bottom.  He used to work that jar forever chewing the side down and getting his tongue to the bottom.  He does still like breakfast and dinner and the last bone of the night.  

He used to go outside because he would get a treat when he came back in.  I know what you are thinking - who trained whom - eh, it made him happy and his happiness is so much right now.  I am glad I was a softy.   Now he lifts himself off the floor like a puppet being pulled up with tangled strings, he gets to the door and I open it - he takes time to sniff the air and looks at the stairs leading to the yard and sometimes just backs up and looks for the treat without ever taking a stepping outside.  The stairs are not the worth the effort anymore.  I give him the treat because he got up and walked to the back door.  He gets a treat for that - he gets a treat because he still wants one.  

His back end is sore and his back legs are weak.  Still, he pushes by me, through the front door, to the porch,  to go for a walk.  There is no holding him back.  And so he goes for walks.  We walk around the block on hot days and a little longer when it is cool and he isn’t panting hard before we get to the end of our block.  Whenever his nose hits the ground or his body pulls the leash Birdee and I stop and wait for him to get all the sniffing he wants at that spot.  We know to give him a chance to pee every time Birdee pees.   We know around the block might take half an hour or 10 minutes.  It doesn’t much matter.   What matters is we are all together.  We are all with Chewie. 

Chewie takes something for his storm anxiety and something else for pain and still something else for a tumor in his nose.  We do acupuncture and chiropractic.  We have some home exercises we do to help ease the tightness in his backend.  He wears a surgical sleeve to keep the hygroma on his elbow from swelling. He never complains about all this stuff. 

In the past 2 months he started to get bloody noses.  And then after one particularly bad one we headed into the vet.  His vets have retired and so he goes into the clinic to see someone I have yet to meet who clearly knows nothing about either of us.  I hate this COVID vet stuff.  It takes us 2 weeks to get an appointment and we end up on a cancellation list.  We get in a few days early.  He has a tumor in his nose that starts to grow profusely all of a sudden.  We discuss options - and land on trying to shrink the tumor with steroids.  He has to come off some of his pain meds.   It just seems so cruel.  Nose work was the last of the things we can do together.  He quit playing ball, and agility and running, and skijoring, and now he has to stop sniffing too?  Nah - he still sniffs we just do everything for the joy of it now - every sniff, every breath, every snuggle - it is gravy for us, me, Birdee and Chewie.  

He sleeps more and his sleep is a deeper sleep.  He still greets me and barks and wags his tail when I touch him.  He nestles his head on my legs and rubs his face on my leg while I scratch his back.  He lets me wrap my arms around and put my face into his fur and inhale.    He looks and sounds like Chewbacca.  Sometimes when I sit next to him on the floor he lays his head on my leg and sighs and falls asleep.  Nothing else in life seems to hold my attention and he is always in my thoughts whether I am next to him, trying to work or visiting with someone.  He is always present in my heart and in the front of my thoughts. 

His brain, his heart, his patience are all still in tact.  He sometimes does crazy things like tries to play with Birdee or jump out of the car on his own.    I am his, he is mine, Birdee is his, he belongs to Birdee.  How do we do the right thing - how do people do this?  I love every minute with him.  I hate that his body fails him.   I wish the path was obvious.  We are stepping on stones over a creek that is continuing to swell.  I am trying hard to keep us both from slipping.  I will never be ready.  I love this boy - all of him.